Your previous experience includes a successful company Tesla Amazing and Forbes 30 Under 30 award. What is the story behind those, and what is your passion in bringing up new hi-tech startups to the market?

I have always been passionate about Nicola Tesla’s legacy. From the very beginning of Tesla Amazing story we committed ourselves to disrupt at least two fields — the energy market and the way people move themselves and goods on large distances. We strongly believe that the way both fields are currently organized is massively outdated and that humanity deserves breakthrough solutions to provide a brand new level of effectiveness.

While thinking big, we still needed something to start with and that’s where the Magnetic Notes came in. It appeared to be a relatively easy way to get the ball rolling within the shortest period of time while requiring minimum investments. That’s how it all started and that’s correct — so far we have been quite successful with it.

Cold fusion has for decades remained the Holy Grail and one of the most "heated" topics of the global energy industry. Some scientists - and renowned - deny the very possibility of such a reaction. What do you have to say to all the skeptics?

We’ve been playing with tens of technologies trying to evaluate their feasibility through research and experiments. After all, the technology that lays behind Deneum has been proven the only one yet giving stable and positive results. Frankly speaking, we are not bothering much with positive or negative sentiment around Deneum technology. This helps to stay apart and keep independent scientific judgment, while relying solely on what you see and get out of experiments rather than listening to the buzz created by others.

However, when it comes to my opinion why there is still nothing like Deneum on the market — even the brightest scientists and enlightened industry visionaries tend to stand grounded on their experience and their knowledge when making hypotheses. And what we do is a bit different from anything out there, it’s sort of particle physics terra incognita. The first assumption will most likely be false, just because there was nothing like that before. The cold fusion challengers are desperately hunting for neutrons while the real treasure might be hidden right around the corner. Or might not be. I mean, to create something truly new and standing out of the line, you should think at a different angle and test hypotheses no one has ever thought of testing before, that’s how you get the breakthrough.

Introduce Entrepreneur with brief history of the scientific discovery to form the basis of Deneum company.

This all started in 1988 when Fleischmann and Pons held their experiment and shared their results with the public. There were massive argues in the community around the controversy of their conclusions and claims, but this fostered the interest of two scientists that are now the core of Deneum technological team — Sergei Tcvetkov and Sergei Godin. Since then there was a non-stop theoretical research followed by numerous experiments with different materials in multiple configurations. Having concluded few promising experiments in the Soviet Union and Russia further developments moved to Europe, where in 2012 the main breaking results were achieved. 62 stably positive experiments eliminated uncertainty of the technology feasibility, and that was the right moment to start scaling. Now we are just about to launch our new experimental unit in Estonia, which we’ll be using for proving the scalability hypothesis and fine tuning before revealing the first demonstration prototype.

Deneum claims a ground-shaking breakthrough in energy generation. Are we dealing with the full-size cold nuclear fusion here?

The Deneum technology is based on interaction between two materials, titanium and deuterium, being heated and pressurized to certain levels. As a result we get a very specific and thin level of resonance, which if we manage to maintain as a steady ongoing process creates excessive heat — the excess of output heat over the heat we have to put in. Then we can turn this excessive heat into electricity to get an electricity power station with radically cheap costs, no emissions and no need for maintenance for up to one year.

When it comes to the full-size cold nuclear fusion, I would not claim that our technology accurately falls into this definition. But what I can say for sure is that we are just a few steps away from the first energy generation system of its kind — based not on carbon fuels, solar, wind or bio-masses, but on a blend of non-radioactive materials of a great abundance on earth, creating zero emissions and requiring low costs for maintaining the generation process. But we still have a number of challenges down the road that we have to find solutions for, such as scaling and high efficiency heat-to-electricity transformation.

Economy always meets new technology expecting either a miracle or disaster. How do you think will Deneum influence the global economy? Which industries will benefit - and who is to sink into oblivion? Name at least some of the use cases.

That sounds absolutely fair to me. The evolution and technological progress is sort of ruthless, leaving sometimes quite a painful imprint on huge groups of people. But these negative impacts are normally short-term. The opportunities and advantages offered by Deneum technology are endless and actually give people hope to live witnessing the better future. Long-term, these technology-driven social turmoils seem to be absolutely worth paying the price. I mean, I’m not heartless, but if we were too compassionate and not forward-looking, prospective-oriented species, we would still be riding horses and using pigeons for messaging.

I do think that in 20-30 years from now we will be looking back wondering how dared we to burn coal and oil for charging our smartphones or moving ourselves around. That will seem ridiculous and out-of-date.

You’re literally tokenizing cold fusion energy. Why token sale, not institutionals? Show them a working prototype of the Power Station, and major players will line up to snatch the smallest part of the company.

Right, and that is the main and only reason why we are a bit hesitant in regards to institutional investors. If you take a look at their normal practice, they never let the disruptive technology that might «spoil» their multi-billion business go — they will do everything they can to dig a deep hole and hide it even deeper for as long as they plan to stay in the business. If we agree on strategic cooperation with a major industry player right now, we’ll likely be swallowed in a matter of seconds. The technology will never be brought to the market. And this does not resonate with our aims, even though we could get larger investments and spend much less time and effort. We will let the big sharks join the move, but only once we evolve into a “too hard to kill, easier to join” type of company.

What are your further steps and when should we expect a prototype - and the actual installation model? What about the ICO pipeline?

The new experimental unit will come live mid-August 2018 followed by our first demonstration unit in Estonia this September. Deneum is committed to accomplishing the mass-market prototype by June 2019. The project aims to start selling energy produced by its Power Stations to the largest energy pools by the end of 2019. Deneum general purpose Power Station supplies to kick off in 2020.

As for the Deneum token sale, we are about to launch the second private round. Our roadmap implies the the pre-sale to start late September, while the token sale main stage will take place October to December, lasting for 1 to 2 months depending on project traction and the market sentiment. Deneum plans to raise a total of $89 M during all ICO stages. Deneum token will be listed and therefore become available for trading on exchanges within a month after concluding the public token sale.

More from Entrepreneur

Kathleen, Founder and CEO of Grayce & Co, a media and marketing consultancy, can help you develop a brand strategy, build marketing campaigns and learn how to balance work and life.